CLEVELAND — An annual health fair and a run-in with a doctor led to northeast Ohioan Isaac Gideon’s discovery that he had prostate cancer. 

“I met Dr. (Charles) Modlin through the Minority Men’s Health Fair in which he actually saved my life,” Gideon said. 

Gideon and Modlin are both encouraging men to attend the upcoming fair on April 28 at MetroHealth. 

Modlin, a urologist and the medical director of Equity, Inclusion and Diversity at MetroHealth, established the fair in 2003.

“The health fair was an opportunity for men to undergo a variety of free, preventative health screenings to receive health, education (and) physical examinations,” said Modlin.

Modlin launched the fair for a variety of reasons, one of them being to make health care more accessible, especially to minority men. For Modlin, he said his journey into the field as a Black health care professional hasn’t been easy. 

“Sometimes a patient, non-minority patients — even minority patients — may actually question your qualifications, you know, when you first walk in the room,” Modlin said. “They may not know that the physician that is going to come into their room is an African American physician, for example, and at times you do actually see an unwanted response, or expression on their face, or their body language. I mean, that is somewhat of a challenge because as a minority physician, [or] nurse also, you're often tasked with the situation where you actually have to prove yourself. Your credentials in many situations are not enough.”

Through his experiences with patients, he said he hopes to inspire the next generation of diverse physicians as well as expand health care to make it more available to everyone. 

“These health disparities bear out the fact that African American men have the shortest life expectancy out of any group in the United States,” Modlin said.

The fair will be conducted at three MetroHealth campuses — the main branch, the Cleveland Heights branch and the Broadway branch.